AT&T and Sprint have already laid claim to LG’s flagship Optimus G handset, but what of the rest of the Big 4 national carriers? Verizon has been keeping awfully quiet on the subject — maybe because it’s still trying to push LG’s curious Intuition phablet — and for now it seems T-Mobile is making do with another, less illustrious Korean handset.

The carrier has just announced that it will launch the LG Optimus L9, but like nearly every other phone announcement made in the past few weeks, there’s nary a hint at pricing to be found. Even its release date is shrouded in secrecy — all T-Mobile will say is that it’s set to launch “later this fall”.

Even though T-Mobile and LG are clearly keeping key details hush-hush at this point, they couldn’t completely keep the news under wraps.

Here’s the skinny on the Ice Cream Sandwich-powered L9: it packs a 4.5-inch, Gorilla Glass 2-coated display running at 960×540, and a dual-core 1GHz processor of unknown make. Meanwhile, a 5-megapixel camera can be found on the 9.1mm-thick device’s rear end, while the device’s 2,150mAh battery should keep things ticking along for quite some time. Alright, fine, it’s not the most exciting spec sheet you’re going to see over these next few months, and the L9 announcement may highlight an even bigger issue for T-Mobile — what’s going to be their big holiday seller?

For a while there it seemed like the natural heavy-hitter would be HTC’s One X+, which appeared on a T-Mobile document under a pseudonym. As it turns out though, the One X+ is an AT&T exclusive, and the perhaps the only top-tier device that the magenta-clad carrier is expected to carry (the Galaxy Note II) is slated to launch on most other carriers as well.